


i will buy the flower shop, and you will never be lonely

by vaultingus



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: AU, Angst, M/M, larry - Freeform, larry stylinson - Freeform, relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-27
Updated: 2013-01-27
Packaged: 2017-11-27 04:06:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/657863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaultingus/pseuds/vaultingus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>they have a garden and they only pay in the currency of time (a time-passing AU based on The Gambler by fun.).</p>
            </blockquote>





	i will buy the flower shop, and you will never be lonely

**Author's Note:**

> *do not own lyrics/all credit to fun.
> 
> **i'm not going to lie, it's sad. vague descriptions of illness and passing. if you know the story behind The Gambler it will make a lot more sense why this fic is written as such.
> 
> ***accompanying playlist on my tumblr (radicalfaced).

i.  
Louis has finally grown into his two decades and wears them with ease. He thinks he’s never felt anything as intoxicating as the thought that he could pack up his suitcase and wake up in a city his mouth cannot name.

He hears people talk about settling down and making a go of the real world. They want to strike out and grow up as if they are plants that only needed watering and a bit of sunlight all this time, but Louis thinks he would rather be anything than rooted into the ground.  
  
 _I’m special,_ he tells himself on nights when loses his place on the calendar. _I don’t have to grow up and lose myself like the rest of them._  
  
It works, for a time. If he carried a map he could pencil in crisscrossed lines between cities and prove to himself he’s been living without any pattern. He feels unpredictable, and he hopes people wonder where he is, as if he could leave at any minute and move onto something grander, faster, louder.

Car horns soothe him to sleep more quickly than silence ever could, and he sheds his skin each time he leaves another dot on the map until he wonders how he has anything left at all.  
  
His only enemies are time and the soft spots between his ribs.  
  
  
ii.  
He spins until the stars blur and he thinks he might be ill.

It’s been happening more lately—the feeling that nothing earthly can fill up his gaps and make him forget that he’s bleeding time and he still doesn’t know if he’s looking for anything. He tumbles from the height of stretched lips and quick-witted whiskey teeth to begging for the innocent bliss he never savored when he was younger.  
  
 _I’d do it all again if I could_.  
  
He knows he will think the same thing about how he is now (a tentative 20), someday when he’s older and slower, and his teeth chatter when he thinks about holding onto regrets like he used to hold onto pretty nights. Halfway between drunk and terribly sober, he tells himself he’ll run faster the next day and spread his fingers against a new skyline as the sun is setting and somehow he will know where he’s supposed to be.  
  
He aches for what he has let slip through his fingers but even more for the buildings he sees whirring past with a cheek pressed the glass of buses and trains. He acutely feels that he’ll never get to explore them, that for every city he does connect on his webbed map, he will have to forget about ever visiting ten more, twenty more. 

There is an entire universe he will never get to explore and suddenly he feels so tiny he has to pull his knees to his chin and hold himself together until morning.

  
iii.  
 _We were barely eighteen when we crossed collective hearts / It was cold, but it got warm when you barely crossed my eye.  
_ _And you turned, put out your hand, and you asked me to dance / I knew nothing of romance, but it was love at second sight._

  
iv.  
He thinks he’s never seen such wide eyes when Harry shuffles across the floor and stands toe to toe with him. Strings of fairy lights wired across the ceiling form yellow x’s in this boy’s child eyes, and Louis thinks only twice before lacing his fingers through Harry’s and following him anywhere.  
  
Louis thinks someone like this boy could be his charm bracelet if he ever bothered to collect anything besides sunrises and uncalled telephone numbers on scraps of paper.

He knows he is too drunk when he catches onto the end of a stray thought very unlike him: he would start his calendar over at day one if Green Eyes would stay by his side through the end of the year.

For the first time in his life, he wishes he would let himself stay in one place for more than stolen handfuls of time.  
  
  
v.  
Harry bites above his hip and Louis wonders how he never noticed his colorlessness before the bruising.  
  
vi.  
They spend five years chasing each other down the coast, and Louis licks the sea salt from Harry’s cheeks before they fall asleep.  
  
The sight of Harry against the roiling grey water hollows out a part of Louis he didn’t know he had spent years filling.  
  
The next morning, he says he wants to move to the desert before he opens his eyes.  
  
Harry says yes, if they can live in a proper house. Louis starts to feel the first of his roots returning and hopes the unforgiving desert sand will stop them from growing any deeper.  
  
  
vii.  
 _I swear when I grow up I won't just buy you a rose / I will buy the flower shop, and you will never be lonely._  
  
Louis sees the end of another decade approaching before he realizes he has found home.  
  
“I wanted to string chains of dandelions across all the furniture for you,” Harry says one day when Louis walks through the door, “but I forgot we live in the desert.”  
  
Louis stands on his toes and blinks against Harry’s cheek.  
  
“You could have at least gathered some tumbleweed for me,” Louis says and Harry laughs for a few seconds too long.

As they tuck themselves into bed that night, Harry whispers about his day to Louis like a random Tuesday could be a treasure map and he has found its purpose buried in the sand outside their back door.

The last thing he mumbles keeps Louis up for hours more.  
  
“ _For even if the sun stops waking up over the fields / I will not leave, I will not leave 'til it's on time.  
_ _So just take my hand, you know that I will never leave your side_.”

  
  
viii.  
Louis is scared of 40 and Harry has shadows spreading underneath his eyes.  
  
  
ix.  
 _You think that I nearly lost you when the doctors tried to take you away._  
 _But like the night you took my hand beside the fire thirty years ago_ /  
 _'til this day, you swore you'd be here 'til we decide that it's our time._

  
On the day they find out the news, Harry looks down.

Louis looks up and asks how the 18-year-old with strings of lights reflecting in his eyes can be emptying from the inside out.  
  
He wishes he had bottled up all their joy from their first ten summers when they had picked strawberries on their hands and knees so they could fill the cupboard with reasons to lick at the corners of each other’s lips.

Harry grows smaller and takes all the items from the shelves of Louis’ ribcage: the dried bouquets Harry had left around the house when they had first moved into their home and tried to make friends with the ghosts they felt walking the hallways. He steals back the way he loved to ask Louis to dance in the middle of the night against the tides of sleep.  
  
Louis grows bigger and tries to be enough for both.  
  
 _But it's not time, you never quit in all your life / So just take my hand and know that I will never leave your side._

 

x.  
 _You're the love of my life_.  
  
  
xi.  
Louis grows Harry a tiny garden in the middle of the arid desert. Even though Harry says it must have been too much trouble, Louis knows he will remember this age by the way Harry’s eyes drink in the lush grass of the same color and how Louis has managed to make him look alive for the first time in weeks.  
  
All the years he spent on the heels of fleeting euphoria were a waste compared to seeing Harry sink into the soil and run his fingers across the petals of flowers he can name by genus and species.  
  
Louis turns away from the window when he realizes the flowers flourish with enough water and sunshine when Harry cannot, no matter how hard they cross their fingers and wish to turn back to an invincible twenty.  
  
  
xii.  
The next year, Harry can’t make it out to the garden so he props his elbows on the windowsill and watches.  
  
He says it’s enough just to know the flowers are there.  
  
“I’m here, too,” Louis reminds him, just in case he has forgotten.

Harry says he knows, and Louis tries to freeze the frame so they never lose anything they have spent years growing.  
  
  
xiii.  
“People aren’t homes,” Louis says. “They crumble too easily.”  
  
Harry nods.

Louis wants to shove his hand into his mouth to stop himself from saying any more. He doesn’t, though. He watches Harry’s shoulders as he says he shouldn’t have put his faith in such a weak frame.  
  
They lower a half-inch, and Louis finds himself running across the room to press apologies into Harry’s face and neck.  
  
Louis spends the next twenty-four hours making an inventory of Harry’s body; he outlines everything about Harry that makes him home.  
  
After awhile, his words fade and he shows Harry his favorite places with his teeth and his tongue.

_I claimed the insides of your elbows the first time you spent the night. I rubbed lotion into your winter skin and told you that you matched the snow outside. It’s been so long since we’ve seen snow, hasn’t it, love? The desert changed you. It brought the color to your cheeks and spun gold in your hair. Do you remember the day I tried to cut your hair and you almost cried when you saw your curls on the floor? From that day, I swore I’d only give to you, never take anything away. I didn’t want to make you smaller or less. You’ll always be more to me, even though your spine rises from your back sharper than ever. I think I’m the only one who would rather trace your freckles than look at the sky in June._  
  
 _Is that what makes a home? Are you home because I’ve spent so many days wrapped up in your details? I’ve decorated you, at least. I’ve hung up promises on your neck and we never cared who saw those: black and blue, red and swollen, each one said I promise I’ll stay another day._

_Are you home because you changed me? I used to think a home would feel like a prison, but now I realize it’s what freed me from my search for something that doesn’t exist. When you have a home, you don’t need to live forever._  
  
 _All those people who grew up in the same place their entire lives; do they ever lose the feeling of that being their home, even after they’ve moved on? Do old men still think about running underneath the willows in their yard when their knees were strong and their clothes were stained with grass?_  
  
 _I won’t ever move out of your skeleton._  
  
Somewhere along the line, his kisses turned into a goodbye note, and he jams his eyes shut so he won’t see it inked on Harry’s skin.

Louis doesn’t do _goodbye._ He only ever says _see you later._

 

xiv.  
He hates that he can gather Harry in his arms. He dresses Harry up in his favorite clothes and carries him to the garden.

“Next year, can we plant poppies?” Harry’s voice is thin.

Louis kisses the nearest curl and promises he will plant anything Harry wants, even if it doesn’t grow in the desert. Decades side-by-side Harry has made him believe that these sorts of things are entirely possible.  
  
Harry falls asleep and Louis lifts his hair to whisper into his ears.

“Poppies, and daisies. I’ll make you a crown of daisies and this time I will have the nerve to ask you to dance. I’ll take your hand and we’ll dance on top of the flowers we spent so long planting. It doesn’t matter; they will grow back next summer. I just want one more waltz.”  
  
 _We've got fifty good years left to spend out in the garden /_

 _I don't care to beg your pardon, we should live until we die._  
  
  
  
xv.  
Harry is the sappy one, really; the one who always wears his tears like jewelry dripping down his cheeks and neck when he is overflowing from what Louis imagines to be an oversized heart. Louis inhales his feelings neatly and refuses to breathe again until he’s sure they’re trapped inside and will not pull him apart with their force.  
  
It has been impossibly long since Louis has believed in wishes stemming from wax candles or crossing his fingers underneath shooting stars, but he hesitates every birthday anyway as he frantically searches through the discarded fragments of feelings inside, trying to find what he is looking for. He thinks a wish would be a terrible thing to waste, just in case there is more to the universe than black holes and never-ending galaxies full of chaos and tiny beings like him.  
  
He clenches his teeth through another birthday dinner and tries to ignore the points on Harry’s teeth as he smiles wide enough to swallow both of them whole. Harry sings, of course, softer than he used to but with the same pauses that Louis has come to know from all the birthdays they’ve spent holed up in this kitchen.  
  
He balls his fists under the table as he leans down and holds his lips dangerously close to the flame. _I’ll have my wish before the wax reaches the bottom of the candle,_ he vows as he bites his lip and tries not to suffocate under the feeling that he is running out of time.  
  
 _Harry needs this_. He sees the flames flickering in Harry’s widened eyes across the table, and suddenly he feels as if they are 18 years old trapped inside bodies that are pulling them farther apart with each passing second. He feels old.  
  
 _When did we get old?_  
  
He chokes back a sob and even the voice in his mind is shaking as he begs for fifty more years. It would never be enough, but he asks anyway. He wants fifty more years of midmorning tangling ankles and reading aloud from the newspaper. He wants Harry to be able to breathe again; he begs for fifty more years of pink lungs and red lips on the boy who has become his home.  
  
He knows they can’t channel the spirit they once had, and that the blanket-fort wonders of not knowing what direction their lives would take next are over. They planted their garden, so to speak. Every year the flowers peek up in the soil, Louis feels surer that they have not missed out on anything by taking over this house.  
  
He just needs more Harry, more time to find himself.

So, he asks for fifty more and blows out fifty candles in one gust.  
  
Harry pretends he isn’t exhausted and they talk all night to the background of their record player. Louis pretends his eyes don’t fill with tears when Harry chooses the record from their first dance and hums along.  
  
Harry can’t dance tonight, but they hold each other under the blankets and Louis thinks he can see pale imprints of their 18- and 20-year-old selves twirling around the room and laughing. Harry still has lanterns in his eyes (they just burn softer now, as if they’ve been moved farther).  
  
Harry is the one to lick the saltwater from his face, this time, and as if he read Louis’ mind, he whispers, “fifty more years of this, Lou.”  
  
They are home.

 

xvi.

_So we move out to the garden / look at everything we've grown._

Louis doesn’t say _goodbye_. He says _I'll_   _see you later_.

  
  
xvii.  
There is a layer of dust on the floor that tells the story of two boys who pressed flower petals into old books that they titled after each other. They were only a blip in the heartbeat of the universe. Now, one is floating and so the other ripped out his roots and never stops moving. He wonders if it is possible to ever forget your first home.

 _Never_.  
  
His mind echoes before he gives into sleep. Always the same honey voice spitting sweet promises into the air: _fifty more years of this_.  
  
He wonders if anyone has kept up their garden. He hopes someone has planted poppies the color he thought hearts were when he was 18 and a boy swept him off his feet and showed him how to stay.  
  
 _Fifty more years of this,_ he thinks to their young ghost selves, still twirling around the living room of their desert home.


End file.
